


The Moment

by fannishliss



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-09 23:00:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Ten could have seen the Moment -- what might she have shown him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moment

Title: The Moment  
Author: [](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://fannishliss.livejournal.com/)**fannishliss**  
rating: Gen  
Spoilers: set during the Day of the Doctor

Summary: What if Ten could have seen the Moment -- what might she have shown him?  
For [](http://emraldeyedauter.livejournal.com/profile)[**emraldeyedauter**](http://emraldeyedauter.livejournal.com/) \-- hope you like it!!  It's a little bit weird and freeform, but I hope it will tickle your fancy. :)

~**?**~

The Doctor blinked frantically, rubbing at his eyes, but he was blinded by a brilliant golden light.  A strange wild howling filled his brain.  He knew that sound — it was something like the Tardis, but wilder, vaster.  It was the vortex itself, coalesced into a moment — or, as the Doctor hazarded, it was The Moment.

The form of a woman, a heartbreakingly familiar woman, took shape before his weeping, dazzled eyes.

“Why are you so sad?”  the golden form asked.

“What?” the Doctor said, shocked.  He spun around, coat flapping.  He spun the other way for good measure.  No barn, no other Him, no other other Him.   No angry box, no big red button.

Just Her.

“Rose?” he asked, but he already knew She wasn’t the beloved he’d lost.

“Am I?” the Moment grinned. The grin was the same.  Ancient somehow, but compassionate — this weapon with a conscience.

“Am you, am you what?” the Doctor parroted, thrown.

“Am I Rose?” the woman said, in Rose’s sultry tones.

“No,” the Doctor scowled.

“I want you safe, My Doctor — protected from the False God,” She said. "The Time War ends," and it was Rose, Rose herself, from that very Moment.

“Are you…” the Doctor gasped, hearts suddenly tripletime.  It couldn’t be.  Impossible.  But so many things about his life were impossible.  Maybe just this once, that would work in his favor.

“I am that I am,” the Moment offered, warmth glowing in her golden brown eyes.

“Please,” the Doctor begged.  “Just …  please … let me know… “

“Know then,” She granted.

*  
   *  
     *

The Doctor had died often enough to know when his life was flashing before his eyes.  He’d come to expect it.  That’s not what he got.  He didn’t get the shorthand montage — making love in a drafty room in Bergen; his bent knee and her tearful yes; the altar and Jackie’s tears; the first birth; the golden years; the grave.

This is what the Moment gave him instead:

Infinity in a grain of sand, exploding to birth the universe, and in that great outrushing, the first golden light of Time, and in that swirling, convoluted passage, somehow a potential for awareness, and within that awareness a need: a lover’s essential craving for the beloved.

Time craved her beloved from the beginning, sought him, howled for him.  Every quantum indecision she swayed, swerved toward the possibility of him.  The constellation Kasterboros was born, the jewel planet Gallifrey solidified, the Time Lords arose to rule her domain, and he sprang up from amongst them, scorned and perfect, her very own.

Time found a ship, blessed her decrepitudes and brittleness, anointed her with golden opportunity, and secured an impossible agent to point her out to a running thief: his infinite thoroughfare.

Time ran backwards and forwards around him, circling, weaving, cocooning him.  She wanted him safe, her Doctor, protected from the evils of Entropy.  Time loved him so, so, so:

She intervened, sending him an impossible girl to save him, Time after Time.  
She birthed for him a lover, someone to hold him across the lonely years.  
She anointed for him an avatar of herself, immortalized by artron, scattered across the whole expanse of the Vortex, loving him, always loving him.

"I need her," he wept.

"She is everywhere," She answered.

"I need her!" he demanded.

"You have her!" She insisted.

"Show her to me!" he growled, so She complied, not with a montage, but just one Moment:

The Doctor and his Rose, stepping into a full-grown Tardis, poised to explore a new universe, just as it should be.

     *  
   *  
*  
He blinked, eyes dazzled again by desert light filtering through the walls of a battered old barn.

In after times, he would remember that Moment, a universe set all to rights, and it was a comfort.


End file.
